Chad Yakobson is part scientist, part brewer and part businessman – a visionary with an almost obsessive respect for tradition and plans lurking in his head that would make Willy Wonka proud.

His Crooked Stave Artisan Beer Project, which began in Fort Collins more than a year and a half ago, has attracted a devoted following for its complex, delicate beers brewed with the finicky wild yeast, Brettanomyces.

After a lot of planning – and keeping things close to the vest – Yakobson is finally ready to reveal the details of his relocation to Denver, and his longer-term vision for his brewing operation.

On Sept. 5, Yakobson said he plans to open Crooked Stave’s first tasting room: an intimate, roughly 30-seat space with six tap handles in a small industrial-like park at 1441 W. 46th Avenue, Unit 19, Denver.

The site is primarily his barrel room – beer is aging in nearly 100 barrels housed in the big back room that Yakobson might open, Avery-style, for drinking events. He expects to have 300 barrels by Christmas, including four foudres – huge barrels capable of holding three times as much beer as a standard barrel.

That drinking space – on the northern edge of Highland’s Sunnyside neighborhood – will only be temporary, though. Within about eight months, Yakobson expects to close that taproom and move to larger space in The Source, part of a planned high-end artisan market in an 1880s foundry building at 33rd and Brighton in River North.

There, Crooked Stave will operate a 20-barrel pilot system, a “brewer’s playground” Yakobson will use to produce seasonals and one-offs. Think low-gravity beers like a 2.8 percent Belgian pale ale or a 3.5 percent light, oak-smoked saison. Or Danish-style Baltic porters. The U-shaped bar in the 1,000-square foot taproom will seat about 80, and drinkers will be able to spill out the doors into the market area.

Yakobson said he signed a seven-year lease on The Source building earlier this month.

Then, after that … well, more on that a little lower.

“For us, the question always is, ‘What are we going to do next?’” Yakobson said. “Crooked Stave is about science and research and experimentation … For me, it’s about making the highest quality products.”

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Yank out a nail with pliers, and you've got a tasting

Yakobson uses the term “we” a lot, but he is Crooked Stave. The Colorado native earned an undergraduate degree in bacterial science from CSU, did post-graduate work in New Zealand studying wine-making, worked as a sommelier and an assistant brewer in London, and earned a master’s in brewing and distilling from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland.

There, he turned a beat-up closet into a fermentation lab, experimenting with a wild yeast that brewers have long considered a plague: Brettanomyces. Yakobson wrote his dissertation on Brett. (He traces his interest in the wild yeast to discovering New Belgium’s La Folie when he was 19 or 20, when most drinkers are experimenting with Keystone Light).

About the name: Those wooden slats on barrels are called staves. As they dry out, they get crooked and leak. As a brewer drawn to the difficult art and science of barrel-aging, Yakobson had his name.

“There is no one putting out a year-round 100 percent Brett beer,” he said. “I did 10 last year. We are the crooked stave in the industry – something that’s very different and doesn’t fit in, in many ways. It’s not reinventing the wheel. But I’m certainly enjoying the way people are rethinking the wheel, which is beer.”

Although Crooked Stave is often characterized as a sour beer specialist, Yakobson has yet to release a sour beer. (He will – several sour barrels are about ready to be tapped). Brett can help make a beer sour, but not all Brett beers are sours. Yakobson proposes a third style to go alongside lagers and ales to describe beers he and other kindred souls are brewing: wilds.

Yakobson has filled 22 oak barrels with a saison brewed at Prost that will age up to six months before it is ready to blend. These are not farmhouse ales, Yakobson said, but true saisons, like those brewed in the 19th century. He plans on offering a couple of year-round saisons: One 4.2 percent traditional saison, the other a 6.2 percent rustic, 5-grain version.

Crooked Stave also will offer two 100-percent Brett beers year-round: St. Brett, which Yakobson said will have a tart, citrus character with a hint of coriander, not too different from a Belgian wit; and a series of imperial pale ales called Hop Savant. Yakobson describes it as a “new age IPA” and will rotate in different hop varieties (say, Galaxy hops in one batch, perhaps another with all-German hops).

As for those farther-down-the-road plans …. Yakobson said Crooked Stave has a one-year lease on the 46th Avenue location. Eventually, in the next three to four years, he would like to build a second brewery in addition to The Source facility, ideally between Golden and Boulder, with a horticultural focus.

He aspires to have a lot of acreage, with space for greenhouses with raspberry bushes and grapes, a small hop farm – even room for festivals with on-site camping.

Like brewing saisons, it’s a process, an evolving project – what Crooked Stave is all about.

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In Colorado, our pint glasses overflow with excellent beer. New breweries, new batches, festivals every other week. How lucky are we? First Drafts is The Denver Post's beer blog aimed at helping you keep tabs on the state's ever-expanding craft beer culture. We offer a mash of news, event coverage, homegrown stories, tasting notes and tips to help you imbibe. Expert drinker or homebrewer? Let us know what you're loving about Colorado's beer scene. Not sure exactly what a firkin is? No worries, let us be your guide. Go ahead. Belly up and drink it in!